While We Can | Food and Travel Photography

A Moveable Feast: Silverfast 8 Disappoints

anthonynchandlerphotography — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:21:57 +0000

V. and I watched Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and I was howling at the way Hemingway was portrayed by Corey Stoll. In Grade 7, we study Hemingway’s brilliant novel, Old Man and the Sea, and over the past few years I have learned more and more about the legendary persona of Hemingway. The caricature is a striking encapsulation of what he must have appeared like as he attempted to become a famous writer: a buffoon who grew up in Oak Park in relative comfort, but who slummed it in Paris to earn his street cred. Unlike many of the people I went to school with at McGill, Hemingway’s feigned bohemianism does result in him learning his art – even if he must fight, drink and sleep his way into his prime manhood. Indeed, the more pseudo-intellectuals I meet who tell me that I should “read Nietzsche to understand Thoreau”, the more I realize that Hemingway had it right when he hated intellectuals who were weak in the way they lived without truth in their lives.

Silverfast 8 for Lion has been a total disaster, and I must admit that I am gravely disappointed in the lack of support from the company. I did receive a single response suggested that I unhook everything and hope for the best. Wow. Brilliant. In fact, this is their “standard” response email as many others have reported the same note online. Where does that leave me?

Fortunately, I found my cd containing Silverfast 6.6, and was able to install it on my Snow Leopard-running laptop. While it is not an ideal situation, this will allow me to scan for the next six months without needing to purchase the awful Version 8. Yes, the interface looks prettier, but that is of no use to me if the software crashes every 5 minutes. Get it together Silverfast…certainly do not charge $189 for the upgrade download of what is a Beta version at best.

Finally, I spent $25 for a month of Lynda.com use. While I would have preferred to save the money for a rainy day, Lynda has just uploaded a wide series of ProTools 10, Reason 6, 8×10 Film Photography and Food Photography videos that made $25 ridiculously cheap. I would not want a year long subscription Lynda or Kelby Training, but in a small dosage [when I have the time to watch online videos] it is a superb way to learn for a photographer/audio recorder.

It has been a week of pasta dishes here in Toronto. First, we made a brilliant seafood pasta in a cream sauce on Friday night based on littleneck clams and mussels. By using artisanal pasta cooked al dente, the dish came together into a harmonious blending of garlic, butter, cream and the ocean. On Sunday, it was a red sauce based on canned San Marzano tomatoes. Yes, at $4.59 a can these are not cheap, but matched with frozen mixed seafood the canned fruit made for a rich sauce to coat the sagnarelli bronze cut pasta from Italy. Bella!

The Alchemist’s Apprentice: Revision of Our Education System

anthonynchandlerphotography — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:34:53 +0000

About two year’s ago I began a separate blog about my theories of education. I only wrote one post before I focused all of my efforts on While We Can, and the post just sat there…until this morning. I thought I would repost the ideas there as a starting point forward as I have spent the last week reading Gladwell, Robinson and Gardner’s novel concepts of where the education system needs to go.

-Introduction-

The most effective way of teaching is by learning and letting others watch. -Chandler

When I was in Grade Six, my teacher did this crazy thing: he let me learn. He had a simple system that allowed students who scored 90% on his bi-weekly tests to go, unsupervised, to The Learning Centre. If you learned what you needed the first week, then you did not need to be in class for the second week. Instead, you were able to create an independent learning schedule where you learned about whatever you wanted to, and then reported what you learned back to him in the form of a log/report/presentation of your choosing. It allowed him to have more one on one time with those students who needed it and it rewarded those for whom the material was simple.

One week I read about sharks and wrote a book report. I read National Geographic articles, picture books with images so frightening that I stopped swimming in pools, and even looked at a shark jaw for inspiration. Another week, I spent playing with the cutting edge Commodore Vic-20 computer system, learning how to program in Cobalt or some other obscure language; I made the screen change colour and flash my name over and over until it almost started a seizure. In later weeks I listened to The Beatles, read The Lord of the Rings, wrote love letters[1] to the pretty girl in class, did a live radio show for my peers, wrote a screenplay and produced a movie starring the cool kids. I loved going to school. By the end of the grade I had scored the second highest mark in my class and was chosen to participate in the French Immersion program. Perhaps more importantly, my teacher gave me a writing journal featuring hobbit drawings in the corners; it was meant to inspire me to continue writing and do something great with my life.

While it may sound like nostalgic revisionism, I can honestly say that the rest of my academic career and my professional achievements can be traced back to those six months spent in that room. Writing, music, film, computers and media have been what I love to do. I even went to South Africa to chase down the Great White Shark, and perhaps it was because I spent so much time learning about it in Grade Six. My family was not wealthy, and we were not well-educated. Yet, I spent eight years in universities learning about what interested me, and I have spent twelve years teaching students about what interests me most right now. I am not that interested in either the best teaching practices outlined by my professional association, or co-ordinating interdisciplinary multi-modal curriculums from a down-designed paradigm, but rather I am fascinated by why electronic books will fail because they cannot emulate various fonts, how Hasselblad makes camera lenses from sand, and what is the best way to organize my tax receipts so that I maximize my resources in a failed economy.

The premise of this blog series is to explore why humans learn, how educators can maximize their own growth while improving their students’ chances of success, and to examine my own learning process within a period of one year. My part in the experiment will be to tackle my areas of weakness and loathing: mathematics, science, religion, drawing, music notation, and the basic mechanics of machines. The theoretical framework for my research will examine current ideas on intrinsic motivation, flow, mastery, creativity and productivity. This is not a reflection of the educational gobbley-gook that one studies in universities, although I may reference it in passing, but rather a reflection of the human brain, our curiousity, and how to foster an imagination in our children that will outperform the all products of the current teaching models that aspiring teachers follow like a cookbook.

Ironically, I hope to inspire an absolute subversion of how teachers perceive their purpose, while looking to the most arcane and institutionally conservative subjects I could imagine. I will inevitably discuss how technology becomes the ideal foil for exploring arcane ideas of creativity and production, and briefly look at how trends like the steampunk movement and hackers entwine themselves within these concepts of learning. The true goal for this project is to allow me to learn more about the world that fascinates me and to permit myself the guilty pleasure of taking the time to figure out what purpose an equation serves, how to make a machine that works and to expand my drawing beyond my beautiful stick figures.

The White Noise of Wonderland

Our world is a cacophony of information. The white noise of new media has successfully drowned out the human ability to maintain extended focus, to question the validity of knowledge, and to synthesize what we receive into what we perceive. Within the realm of education, teachers find themselves assaulted by constantly changing mantras of new curriculums, the application of brain science to the classroom, and the assertion that since knowledge is now superfluous it is our role to instruct how to access the plethora of sources with ease and speed.

Students multi-task themselves through increasing amounts of homework while watching television, listening to fragments of their favourite songs, and social networking with fifty friends. As the old adage goes: garbage in and garbage out. Their ability to fixate their attention span has steadily decreased, but their perception of working has steadily increased; but this is the new paradigm for most of the modern world, is it not?

How many of us spend our day merely reacting to requests for reactions that produce nothing other than requests for reactions?

Humans like to measure our success by days, weeks months and years. We set time-based goals and objectives to provide a sense of accomplishment to our daily lives, and yet, our reasonable, allowable time-frames to achieve those objectives have exponentially decreased. I am often told by people that they had always wanted to play guitar. Actually, I have been often told that their lifelong dream has been to be able to pick up a guitar and play their favourite songs. When I ask if they have ever tried, the answer is always: “I did, but after an hour I realized that I would never be able to play [insert song here]”. Imagine the frustration on their face when they asked me how I learned and I reply: “I practiced ten hours without any success, but by then I could play three chords and one scale. It only took twenty years after that before I realized that would never be a rock star, but it was worth the time. I love the guitar.”

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell famously hypothesizes that it takes about 10,000 hours to become successful in any field, and his argument does seem to prove reasonable to most adults and children. What does not seem reasonable to the average person is that he would need to spend so long to achieve his goals; to practice hitting a ball, plucking a string, working on an algebraic equation for any longer than absolutely necessary is such a waste of his valuable intelligence. Certainly, there is a shortcut, a quick-fix method, that will enable a man of his intelligence to circumvent time and effort. He is not getting any younger, after all, and there is an infinite world of goals to accomplish before death. Perhaps this is why GarageBand, and then GuitarHero, have become immediate sensations: they provide the illusion of mastery. By following the coloured patterns on a screen, one can feel like a rockstar wielding his favourite axe before a crowd of tens within the hour; there will be no blood on the fingertips unless something goes terribly and inexplicably wrong. While it may never provide the lasting satisfaction so desperately craved by the human spirit, it will provide a junk-food type hit that will fool the hundreds of thousands who really just wanted to play guitar, to stand out from the average Joe.

Personal relationships take years and tears to build. Fortunately, social networking sites have allowed us to foster those friendships in a manner similar to the Japanese electronic games wherein one clicks buttons to feed their pet to let it grow to the ever-coming next level. Sadly, some social networkers have gone so far as to believe that they can build personal friendships by playing such games[2] and then notifying of their most recent successes.

The major flaw in modern education is that its foundations are laid up the cornerstone of the Industrial Age: external motivation. As Ken Robinson[3] muses in his TED talk, the Victorians created our institutional system of education to fill the factories with competent workers who would toil to rise above the poverty levels suffered before the 20th century. Daniel Pink further supports Robinson’s revelation when in his powerful piece Drive, he coins the term of Motivation 2.0 as the methodology used by management to motivate productivity from the unproductive employee base. The fact is that fewer people in the 21^st century are motivated by the external motivations promised by the American Dream, as our disillusionment began with the Great Depression and has continued to this day.

The key to reducing the weight of one’s need to commit to learning has to be related to creating a reproducible path from a foundational knowledge that will inspire students and teachers to own intrinsic motivation enough to produce flow to fulfill the 10,000 Hour Rule and thereby produce a level of mastery at which creativity can occur if given the 80-20 Rule of Motivation 3.0. Simple? I say it is if, and only if, we begin by creating a foundational education based on the masters who were already working in this ideal space of creativity: the polymaths Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī, Galileo Gailei, Isaac Newton, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Jeffrey Willhelm/Vigotsky asserts that we can only develop when we are within our zone of proximal development because it demands our full participation in the moment. David Allen also argues that being in the moment is essential for productivity. It is essentially a Buddhist/Occidental concept wherein we are most productive when we are no longer concerned with our surroundings, no longer concerned with the world beyond our task at hand. Unfortunately, this Zen fluidity moves against the flow of Western productivity. North American measures production through a series of check boxes and obstacles that we prove our mettle against. However, our new god is financial reward and those who approach the upper echelons are often disillusioned to find that their lives have been spent merely overcoming meaningless tasks that produce very little learning.

Education in the Balance

Education is an expensive proposition. The personal cost to become educated makes the least sense to those who might benefit from it the most. Our traditional methods of institutional learning require access to books, technology, teacher/experts. When a culture has been marginalized they no longer have access to the means for learning other than in apprenticeship with a master tradesman.

Education is inherently dangerous. The Khmer Rouge, for instance, killed the educated people first. Why? Teaching and learning are powerful organizers. A mind that is able to work collectively and independently is capable of destruction; it is capable of subversion that will undermine unpalatable movements.

Education is what the status quo attempt to keep from the lower classes and give their own children. Private schools are able to teach a more flexible curriculum, while public school education remains within the constraints of a curriculum that teaches far below the average student’s zone of proximal development.

The teacher is increasingly discouraged by her administrators, and by her professional organizations to personally disengage with students. Increased classroom sizes, the threat of being accused of unprofessional engagement with students, and the redirection of a teacher’s time to writing useless lesson plans and to attending purposeless meetings, have all contributed to atrophy within the educational system.

The Shift From Specialist to Renaissance Man

Industrialization and Henry Ford’s brilliant epiphany of creating an assembly line steadily focused a person’s level of specialization to a macroscopic level: the only way to ensure absolute dominance in a field was to carve out such a unique, tiny portion of the field that no one else could possibly compete with you in that space. Family physicians became oncologists specializing in finger cancer, vehicle drivers became certified for specific machines, and teachers became Math Specialists for the Middle Years on Floor Two. We all became masters of our domains, and for the past ninety years this increased specialization differentiated our abilities and allowed us to command higher respect and salaries with each new certification. Our systems of knowledge became so complex that a person working in a field may not understand anything about what their partner does working on the exact same product. Darwin might hypothesize that if a disease or predator wiped out all of our Ada or Java programmers, then our species would suffer catastrophes as computer systems began to fail. Imagine a historical novel entitled: The Day After All of the Plumbers Died.

I would argue that the internet has also reduced the value of specialization, but not for the reason you might first consider. Certainly, specialized knowledge is available for aficionados of the most minute speciality; just log on to a forum on Leica cameras or Ducati motorcycles, and you will be awestruck at the human energy and knowledge present. The internet has forced us to realize that no matter how perfect our knowledge of a specific area is, there is always hundreds of people who are better and gaining. Before the digital world allowed us to perceive the vastness of humanity, we conceded that Shirley down the street was pretty darn good at painting landscapes. Now a human can search the world and view the millions of artists doing the exact same thing, at a level far beyond what Shirley could ever accomplish. It devalues Shirley’s wonderful talent. Knowledge of the whole forces us to question the value and uniqueness of our talent, the validity of the piece. One can argue that being able to see the true landscape of achievement should inspire us to strive further, but most often we only realize the fragility of our achievements when we search the internet for peer validation, and instead of providing our egos with warmth, we find a bitter pill: we are one in a million even when playing our best hand.

Within the classroom, our small rooms with thirty children, this happens on a daily basis. Teachers attempt to balance the negative realizations and failures against the growth and positive reinforcement. Perhaps it is because teachers understand best, from years of seeing how far a children can grow if encouraged while being gently corrected, that it is never going to be about the final product. Every child’s learning is a work in progress. When I began teaching at the high school level, I somehow believed that I was responsible for molding the minds of those who would soon pass outside my classroom into the real world. Certainly, students would come back to thank me for some faded moment years later, but very little of that ever had to do with my delivery of curriculum. Now that I teach Grade 7, no one ever will return to thank me because what I do is not perceived as being important to the final product. If teaching were a statue, then Primary education would be the initial shaping of the form, and Senior education would be perceived as the final shaping for judgement. The work in between is not valued because it is neither inspiration nor product, but rather it is process. Our industrialized world values only the creative moment and the final product, but places no value on the process of production.

[1] Please note that I received no credit whatsoever for these letters, and that they were a complete utter failure. [2] See the Farmville application in Facebook

[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Make You Famous: Avoiding Febtober

anthonynchandlerphotography — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:32:54 +0000

If there is one month that tends to be harder than all of the others in Canada, then it has to be Febtober. Fans of SNL will recognize the fictional month from Will Ferrell’s Celebrity Jeopardy skit when Tom Cruise shouts out the answer to the category “Months that Begin with “Feb”‘, and this always makes me laugh. So, February became Febtober, and every year I struggle like all Canadians to get through. Maybe it is the lack of sun, the lack of travel opportunities, the work that piles up or the work that still has yet to show up; all I know is that Febtober is the hardest month of the year.

To deal with that it is usually a good idea to either look forward to the next great adventure or back at one of the previous adventures. I love to travel and I love to eat food. In June of last year my mother and I hit Chicago and Milwaukee to enjoy a few days in the big city and see what food we could find off the beaten path. Our first choice to help with the journey was Chicago Food Planet, a tour company that has daily tours to the hot spots of Chicago’s food scene. Weirdly enough, they were filming a promo video on the day we went with them and I just discovered these frames online.

My Mother and I crossing through Wicker Park to Bucktown; she is trying to not lose me!

Travel is a luxury that allows us to forget the hassles at home. We can hide in the anonymity of the crowd, most of whom are living in the hassle of their own city. For me, Chicago became a little nicer after walking through this edgy, gentrified part of the city. I wish that I had been able to do the same style of tour in NYC the next week, but time just did not allow for the experience.

V. says I was looking grumpy here; I think I look like I ate Chicago.

Ugggh, the major problem with food blogging is that it is all too easy to kill yourself with goodness. I swear that I was ready to explode after just a day in the city. I chalked it up to a necessary part of the adventure – especially after the giant chill dog in Milwaukee’s Harley Davidson Museum. Every night when I am running to get back into shape, I remember that damned dog and imagine it is still working its way through my belly – ha ha ha. It was killer though, and part of life is to enjoy the best it has to offer while we can. Errrr…you just cannot do that very often or you will may not see many more Febtobers.

: Carol was not impressed with the salad; after a hot dog and a marshmallow chocolate shake she knew what tasted good.

The next month will see me getting ready for a week in Thunder Bay and a week in Quebec. Both places will be cold and North. I hope that V. and I will be able to shoot arresting landscapes up north with the Linhof view camera. I ordered 7 film holders from Atlanta and I hope they are all in decent enough shape to use. I will be reading books by Ansel Adams to glean words of wisdom about such work, but I am excited about the possibilities.

Quebec will be a working adventure with the school. Still, dog-sledding, rock-climbing, tubing, cross-country skiing and cabanes aux sucre all have their own fun and thrills to enjoy year after year. I just have to ensure that I do not subsist on bacon and poutine for a week at a time. Ahhhh, Quebec!

Lastly, the first image in the blog was that of my spaghetti and meatballs. I always find it strange that this dish seldom is served anywhere other than at a cheapo kids restaurant. Forget Boston Pizza [deathzone for food] or the pizza joint down the street, as the only way to get an authentic version of this is to luck out in an Italian restaurant in Boston or New York, or to make it yourself “just like your Italian grandma did for four hundred years in Sicily.” Growing up in Prince Edward Island, I thought this was the number one Italian dish, so I was greatly disappointed to figure out that it was more of a North American craze. We will have to see if V. can find any when she hits Rome in April for Easter. Ahhh granmama!

4×5 Film: The First Linhof Negatives

anthonynchandlerphotography — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:13:38 +0000

My first 4×5 negatives came back from Northern Artists lab today, and much to my surprise they were in relative focus and perfectly exposed. In fact, they were exactly as I had imagined the photographs in my mind. The challenge had stemmed from my inability to press the standards close enough with the Schneider-Keruznach 90mm f.8 lens; only after coming in from the blistering cold did I think to switch both standards to the same side of the mount.

The next questions are what do I see here and how did I achieve these photographs? I see the selective focus that draws me deeply to this format. Yes, I can create similar bokeh with a Lensbaby lens or even the 50mm 1.2 lens, but the overall quality is not there in the same way. I do not have perspective control built into the dslr lenses, and though few movements were available with the standards so tightly pressed, there was room for minor adjustments.

In the first photograph the focus is on the clock tower and creating a tilt backwards for the tower in relation to the building’s foundations. At f.16 and 1/15th exposure on Ilford Delta 100 film the details are extraordinary given how far out of my desired focus (infinity) I was.

The second photograph is an attempt to get at least something in focus from the shoot. I had spent my lunch hour focusing and freezing with the feeling that it was an absolute failure from a final product viewpoint. I aimed my focus at the closest window and hoped for the best. Again, the sweep is clean and the tones are consistent throughout the negative. I am uncertain as to whether either of these photographs could grace the cover of the yearbook I am producing for school, but I hope that the first photograph will hit the mark. The result is much, much closer than I had ever expected after the session.

What do I think of shooting 4×5 sheet film? The process is Zen. The challenges make it exciting to even load film in the bathroom in total darkness. The negatives are large and crisp with tonnes of dynamic range. The cost is about $8 an image [not for machine gunners]. You are limited to how many film holders you own [I own two for a total of 4 photographs]. Development time is about 2-3 days, and few labs do this type of work. C-41 is harder to find processing for than BW film. Still, I feel portraiture would be spectacular within a studio set-up wherein you proofed with a digital camera to ensure the lighting was accurate and then shot when with the 4×5 when the subject was at his or her best. If this is what can be achieved on my first attempt using the sheet film, then I can only imagine what V. and I can do after the next weeks ahead.

If You Gonna Play, Then Be Prepared to Blow: Got Game?

anthonynchandlerphotography — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:29:49 +0000

We spend our lives waiting for the moment to shine. Sadly, we most often “rust unburnish’d” from a lack of use, because people wait for the right moment when the universe aligns and calls them to the stage. Have you ever seen anyone called to the stage who has not been on stage before, who has not tossed caution to the wind and risked everything? Neither have I.

Photography is like that for me. I practice and practice. Nothing comes easily and I pay my own ride. But that is not the hard part; the hard part is being ready for the first real opportunity you find to get on the stage and blow. If you go too early, then you may not be able to handle the changes, but if you hold back for an invite, then you may end up going home in regret.

For the past four months I have been at home rethinking the craft of photography and reflecting on how to up my game for the big show. For the previous three years I had been killing myself trying to work a demanding day job while working as a commercial photographer at night. Then…I decided to walk away from the stage and practice the skills that I felt would make my work stand out from the million other professionals who got game. The last thing I wanted to do was to turn my work into a repetitive job that might make money, but was mechanical and served no other purpose. Dexter Gordon did this, and he survived jazz.

So what does it take to be a pro photographer? One look at National Geographic‘s Photo of the Day page shows you who can play and what the level of commitment needs to be when you are trying to get the attention of an audience who has been overwhelmed with brilliant [and terrible] photography. For my own part, I have been considering analogue as a way forward; I have also been considering the best of the best digital formats. I have thought a lot about what my style is, and what I want it to be; do I want style or a voice/vision? I have practiced using the Canon 50mm f.1.2 lens exclusively for the past two months to try to master shallow depth of fields, and I bought V. a lens kit of Mamiya M645 manual lenses [55mm, 80mm and 150mm]for Christmas to enable her to find her own voice and to become a force in her own right. A change is coming fast; I can feel it.

On a side note…I have been reading my send Dickens novel, Great Expectations, this week and I have to admit that I am really enjoying it. On a Kobo eReader I find the pace of Dickens changes and he is perfect for morning commutes when the person next to you is listening to Techno at 7am. I have started this novel four times before and this is the first time I have made it past the first chapter. So for all of its downfalls, the digital revolution does have some benefits. Still, I have hard copies for when the format becomes obsolete…and it will.

Crash, Boom, Silverfast: My First Application Crash in Apple OS X Lion

anthonynchandlerphotography — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:32:30 +0000

It had to happen; I only wish it had happened with a software company that was likely to fix the problem before the next high cost upgrade. Alas, my transition to Lion has crashed my Silverfast AI scanning software, and I really do not see an easy fix. Certainly, there is a $150 upgrade to Silverfast 8, but it crashes my system, too. My initial reaction is to just buy the new upgrade and hope the real thing works better than the demo…not a smart idea, I think. My only option for the moment is to revert to Epson Scan (which sucks donkeys) until I hear back from Silverfast about why it might be crashing. Vuescan, their competitor is offering an odd upgrade option, but I am not really loving Hamrick’s demo either. I will keep the world updated, but recent such problems with ProTools, Adobe and Silverfast make me worry that big software manufacturers might be in big trouble due to the economy and the fact that their software hit its performance apex three years ago, so we do not need to upgrade every six months. Few Apps cost $150 in the App store, right?

In the meantime, my sleep rating has finally become normal after two months. For the first time ever I am out of the 50s and hit 95 last night for my Zeo reading. For two nights in a row I have been in the 90s and my body seems to have adapted to sleeping longer – 9 hours in lieu of five. Sure, I wake up 11 times, but I am at least sleeping and what a difference it makes in my cognition. I feel a little more like myself already. Now I just need to find a way to sleep 9 hours a night in an every more crazy world.

Hmmm, Kodak…things are not looking good for the photography giant, and that worries me. As I mentioned in a previous blog, they were good enough to send me a few rolls of their latest emulsion (Kodak Portra) for me to begin lens testing with for my website. I only hope that I can get out to take the photographs before they disappear in a corporate chop-shop. Regardless, I still prefer their brand to the others and I really hope they can salvage their company by shifting towards what they do best.

I took the Linhof Color 45S 4×5 camera out for its first sheet film expedition. It was a minor disaster, but it was a fantastic learning experience. My main issue was that the Schneider-Kreuznach 90mm f.8 lens would not focus to infinity, which was the type of photograph I was aiming for with the school. I took four photographs despite the fact that they will be blurry, because all learning demands minor failures. The answer? I needed to move the center mount post so that both standards were on the same side of it, thereby allowing for the bellows to compress closely and provide infinity focus. Eureka. I will pick up the four negatives and film holders on Tuesday and start again. I have to admit that attempting to load 4×5 film into the holders in complete darkness was sort of mystical. Rage on MacDuff!

Finally, I worked with a new pie crust recipe from Donna Hay last night. It was a hot water pastry crust that uses boiling water and butter, but no eggs. Like the Lion upgrade, I was taking our dinner into my own hands by trying a new crust. Crust doughs are critical to whatever you are putting into them and I thought that for my first chicken pot pie I would try an Old World crust recipe. The results were delectable and old world, and this must have been the easiest crust I have made yet. Yes, I could have made a prettier job of the top, but I was in a hurry and dinner needed to make it into a warm over.

Updating to OS X Lion: Technology and the Spins

anthonynchandlerphotography — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:39:40 +0000

The decision to move to Apple’s OS X Lion was not easy. Frankly, I was a little timid about moving to the first step in what I feel is going to be a whole new computer paradigm. The Cloud is above us; technology has become integral to how humans engage with the world, and to ignore the flow spells quicksand for those who cannot read the signs. I am torn between the safety of the known and the excitement of the unknown, between the mediocrity of the known and the failures of the unknown. The what ifs are piling up in my mind, and I would have felt better if I had not read George Orwell’s 1984.

The Cloud moves us towards a hive mind, wherein we will lodge our work, our apps, our photos, our favourite things. It will always be available, we will always be available. I am reading Ken Robinson’s bleak and dismal view of the education system and the planet’s future, and it has bummed me out. The youth are without employment, the old people will become ultra-conservative, there will be a class war, no one is learning anything worthwhile but soon enough machines will infiltrate our bodies via nanotechnologies that we cannot even imagine….arrgghhhh! I am sure that Robinson will shed a silver lining soon, but the darkness is bleak and hope is a rare commodity these days. Are children in schools really being led down a path without fruition, and will they rise against us all when there are no jobs and nothing else to do?

Me? I want to forget all of it. I want to pretend that the kids are alright, that I need not worry about being a few dollars in to Mr. Visa for a month or two because I have a great job that can pay the bills, that I should not fret about whether teaching will even exist by the time I had hoped to retire to shoot photographs in my twilight years. Good luck. Where is my apple tree? Where is my house? Where are the kids I might like to have if I didn’t hate children when I am not teaching them? Stop this camel, as I feel rather sick!

Ironically, I also loaded my first four sheets of 4×5 film into the Riteway film holders because I want to attempt shooting the school tomorrow morning for the 2012 yearbook cover. I have put off loading the film for the same reasons that I avoided loading Lion: I was afraid of where the first step might take me, and what the implications might be. What if the 4×5 negatives are complete failures? What if they are so good that I never want to shoot digital or medium format again? What if…what if? Regardless, it should be an interesting exercise of creativity to attempt to take my first large format photographs. I am not expecting much, but perhaps that is what makes the learning process enjoyable – failure with incremental successes over time.

Maybe the only way forward is to accept the change as inevitable and to reassure myself that I will always want to remain on the edge of that change. I may relish the good old days, too, but the future unknown will be what it will be. Our only option is to engage to the world that will unfold before us while we attempt to retain the private joys that we hold dear. The photographs in this blog entry show a juxtaposition of old worlds and new technologies. Neither Egypt nor Vietnam are strangers to upheaval, so perhaps such willingness to let the new fall into the landscape is that next step that we all will take.

Dr. Tony Futdje: The Five Books I Have Read

anthonynchandlerphotography — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:04:15 +0000

I went to graduate school at McGill University. In hindsight, to go to the most prestigious university in Canada while only having graduated from public school and the University of Prince Edward Island seems insane…and it was. I was totally unprepared for the cut-throat world of academia that I had been tossed into. Other students had arrived early, met with the profs they would schmooze under, and taken all of the really cool apartments on the Plateau. Me…I showed up and was the one guy without a teaching assistantship or research grant to start or end. Ironic now, as I teach at Canada’s most prestigious private school; I am a solid teacher by any standards, while most of my McGill peers either burned out, dropped out or work jobs to make ends meet. I suppose that is what two years of trying to learn instead of trying to placate professors did for me in its own weird way. I went in weak, but came out strong.

While at McGill, I had made a few close friends and a few closer enemies, but to fight the stereotype that I was “just a simple, quaint Islander” who merited no serious academic considerations I created a persona based on a satyrical perspective of my colleagues: Dr. Tony Fudtje. Fudtje was clearly a scholar emeritus who truly understood Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism, Post-Marxism and American Pseudo-Lacanian Crypto-Gothic Literatures. He sweated brilliance and jargon, and he wrote the English Department’s monthly newsletter. Fudtje attended lectures by Noam Chomsky at McGill and then hitched a ride to hear Jacques Derrida speak at Queen’s. I may have been patronized by my peers, but Dr. Tony Fudtje kept them all on their toes. Most intriguing was his seminal theory on coming to understand literature through deep reading. His canonical text, The Five Books I Have Read, was required reading at five Ivy League schools and one little university in Madagascar. He was often cited in graduate papers at the school, but never noticed in by brilliant professors who must have read his work, too.

Fudtje’s theory rolled like this – to become a great student of literature one needs only read five canonical texts deeply. Deep reading would permit him to tether his learning to all other experiences ever-afterwards, and would keep his Post-Colonial mind humble, Zen and present. The five texts needed to be from different authors, different genres and be infinitely quotable, because what great academic could not permitted to quote ad nauseum to demonstrate his wit and intellectuality.

The sad truth is that I had probably only truly read a dozen or so books deeply by the time I had begun my M.A. I loved literature in my fashion, but really I loved being in university more. I just enjoyed being around books and interesting people with interesting lives doing interesting things, so to say I had really only read five books was not too far awry. My five books would have been 1984, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, Interview With the Vampire, and The Canterbury Tales, I believe that I travelled further on those five novels than most do on an entire library.

Fortunately, I could speak with force and I did wield a smidgeon of wit; at least enough to carry me through until I could read enough literature to produce a brilliant M.A. thesis in my second year. What is enough? Well, my first year had been a struggle because no one had truly explained what I was supposed to be doing in graduate school. I chose classes to cover my areas of weakness, while my peers chose classes to polish their strengths. My writing was compelling at times, but was a structural mess. I recall being a frantic mess on my first attempt to write a proposal for my thesis. It was only one page, but all of my words were a cacophony of jargon. I spent one year learning how to write in a room on borrowed computers. I painstakingly fought to organize my thoughts into paragraphs and eventually into a 86 page thesis on identity and self-definition.

What is enough? Enough is over one hundred books in my second year. All I did was read each day, and I read whatever my thesis supervisor suggested. From Freud to Nietzche to Charles Taylor to Maquis de Sade to Saint Augustine to Robertson Davies, I read and read and read. I was the Forrest Gump of literary studies for a time. It was a glorious time to be alive, but it was also a hard, penniless time in poverty, too.

Over the past week I have been thinking about reading and why it is essential to remaining mentally active in a world that demands we skim material in lieu of reading deeply. Like Chomsky suggested at that McGill lecture, very little can be said of substance within a sound byte, which is why those in power love to only provide us with platforms to communicate within small boundaries. Would the Arab Spring or the London Riots have occurred without bbm or twitter? Not in the same manner, and certainly not with such simplistic agendas. Like the Occupy Movement, modern revolutions go nowhere because while the ability to mobilize has multiplied exponentially, the ability to clearly define deep, lasting thoughts has diminished to what Orwell would call Newspeak.

Hamlet is literature’s deepest thinker. He spends his days thinking about the ghost, revenge and mortality, but how many young people have taken the time to read Hamlet? American AP classes are crammed with students attempting to cram more pseudo-knowledge gleaned from Wikipedia into their brains than they do taking the time to consider a piece of literature’s lifelong implications. If we cannot learn from the great novels, then what hope do we have of teaching the generations after us to learn deeply from not only the digital knowledges but also the stable, eternal truths found in classic literature?

Dr. Tony Fudtje would argue that his five novels provided him with a clear, concise viewpoint on the most critical pieces of the human psyche and built the scaffolding for all other literature he would read. Orwell’s 1984 taught him to fear the loss of language, to distrust free media, to doubt what governments tell him, and to never have sex with a strange woman above an antique shop. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales expounded on the seven deadly sins, the importance of telling stories, the beauty of a holy pilgrimage and travel, and showed the language as it evolved from French and Anglo-Saxon into Middle English.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet gave him Polonious’ infinite advice on life, Hamlet’s wordplay and keen mind, ways to turn the tables on our enemies by pretending to be madder and weaker than you are, and it brings us the language as it is duplicitous in its actual meanings. Surely, it forces us to ask whether we are better to be than not.

Finally, we find ourselves with two American novels that teach Fudtje the key tenets of the New World. In The Great Gatsby we learn that “rich girls don’t marry poor boys”, but that we can become whatever we want by merely playing to role, by becoming the “great Gatsby” in illusion. Futdje learned that the rich care little for the world around them, and that a man , Tom Buchanan, who reads only one book is more dangerous than a man who has read deeply. He learned what brilliant, modern writing looks like before its author falls apart into a million pieces.

Whereas in Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire leads Fudtje to follow how to seduce and destroy with reckless abandon, and that we are all preternatural creatures with our own philosophies to justify the morality of our actions. He learns that identity is a construct that must evolve if we are to last from one age to the next. He learns that the imaginary is just as important as the realistic, and that we would each begin our life stories in much the same way: I was born, I went to school…I loved.

Flour By Any Other Name: Baking the Way Into Comfort in 2012

anthonynchandlerphotography — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:33:45 +0000

Christmas was a success: Her Royal Marquise India Le Yorkie Poo deigns to lie in her new bed. After two weeks on Prince Edward Island, I was quite happy to return to the safety and quiet of Toronto, which only goes to show that home becomes the space you end up creating for yourself and not a specific place. Still, it was wonderful to spend time with my family and friends at a pace that I seldom can afford here in the metropolis.

As far as my health went over the sugary holidays, I only managed to gain a single pound (which will be gone by tomorrow) much to the thanks of the stomach flu my mom gave me and which I am still not over. Since back to the city, I did manage to get back on the bicycle this afternoon while V. baked up a storm with both a collection of yummy blueberry muffins and a Vienna-style raisin cake. I hate to admit having eaten 5 muffins…India helped.

Baked goods are nice to have on hand. The challenge is to ensure one does not eat all of everything and then promptly explode. At the same time, to shun homemade baking in an age of eating from the box feels like a foolish choice. Yes, there is butter, flour and sugar galore in the cakes, but compared to the processed goods we eagerly shovel into ourselves, I will take my chances with these blueberry muffins over the Starbucks “lo-fat” mound of oily muck.

The recipes that V. tried at my behest were from Nick Malgieri’s The Modern Baker, and so far I have enjoyed the quality of the recipes. I picked the copy up at the Charlottetown Winners, when I was buying dog toys for the bad dogs, and only paid a mere $12.99 for the book. I would have picked up a few other books, but as it was I struggled for 30 minutes to get my bag from the Toronto Island Airport to home.

I do love well-written cookbooks, and over the past three years I have done my best to collect a small, but comprehensive library of books to peruse when I want to look at styles of cookery, photography or even just read how a certain chef might approach hand made pasta or salmon. While the Internet can provide an almost limitless collection of recipes, what it does not provide is an approach that will lead a chef to understanding and improvement. For that, I firmly believe that classic texts like The Joy of Cooking and the Larousse Gastronomique need to be at the foundation of every aspiring chef’s learning. As your library develops you can branch out to pick up the texts that inspire you to pick up a pan. Personally, I seldom use the recipes in the books, but rather use them as a source of inspiration.

My favourite books on cookery over the past few years have been Thomas Keller’s first two texts [Bouchon and The French Laundry], Au Pied du Cochon by Martin Picard, and Donna Hay’s Modern Classics series. Throw in a bit of Batali, Jamie Oliver, Morimoto and maybe even a book on New Orleans desserts and we are in business. What I am not interested in are those awful and trendy books by “celebrity chefs” who do not even have real restaurants – Rachel Ray, Guy Fieri, The LooneySpoons girls or that Skinny Bitch person. Who wants a book with Skinny Bitch in their kitchen: a place of art, comfort and alchemy? Leave the skinny bitches to their skinny latte, and pick up the pie plate for heaven’s sake.

The final shot of the blog is of a veal t-bone steak. V. and I hit the Cheese Boutique yesterday, and along with the truffle hunter sausages and a tonne of specialty items we took home one of these pieces of meat because it seemed like an odd man out cut – an opportunity to cook up a 1960s retro-style plate of simplicity. I am not a superfan of any type of meat that is based on animal youth, but then again I am a superfan of tough cuts that can be braised into submission. Overall, it was a nice cut, but I think that I will leave the t-bones to the old cows.

Finally, I am still working to learn how to use the Canon 50mm f.1.2 L lens at its optimal capacity. This is one tricky lens due to its sliver of focus. Still, my condo has such dark lighting, I am just happy to be able to shoot anything handheld. Back to the grind tomorrow, but the year is already looking up: the CRA just approved a fix for a tax mistake my third-party management company made concerning RRSPs last year. Nothing better than to begin the year on a clean slate with the Tax Man.

Insomnia: Traffic of the Mind

anthonynchandlerphotography — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:32:18 +0000

I find myself wide, wide awake at 2:41am. The past two weeks on Prince Edward Island have left me with many things to consider and reflect upon, but frankly I would rather just be able to sleep tonight. Countless thoughts move through my brain at lightning speed in formations that attempt to co-ordinate with what will need to happen tomorrow, the next day, the next week and onto the March Break so that life moves seamlessly; so that I will be prepared for the occasional pedestrian not waiting for the light before he crosses.

My brain roams over the endless landscape where buffalo, personal goals, professional obligations and human desires roam. There are no antelope who play here. I consider ways to make ends meet, ideas to catalyze change and wonder what be discovered with another hour of close inspection. None of this matters at 2:41am, as I can enact zero changes at this hour, but my brain cares little for such triviality because it knows that tomorrow is an “on” day; my brain wants to be on now.

Please do not tell my brain to relax. Do not tell it to meditate. Do not dare expect me to fall asleep in a few minutes of stillness, because it just won’t happen on my brain’s watch. Like a puppy with the crazies, my brain wants to run helter-skelter with reckless abandon through the household of my past and future. The present need for sleep is superfluous compared to what I did fifteen years ago or what I might do in six days if just the right conditions wander along.

Tonight I am amused at the predicament, if only because I really don’t have to get up early tomorrow. It would be nice, but it is not necessary to get up early until Friday morning when I need to catch the 6am flight to Montreal. Montreal is another island that I love dearly, but that is of no concern tonight, unless of course my insomnia takes me back to bowling alleys where we stole a gravy jug, to the bar were Kevin stole a cow’s skull one wintry night or that martini bar where we stole giant martini glasses on the hottest night of that summer. My brain could go on…

I do wonder whether my old age will end with such a symphony of memories strung out along tethers so faint that only a cat could trace them out with the tips of his sharpest nail. Can the culmination of our lives be anything more that the moments we sneak out while no one at the bar is paying attention? Is it better to go home early with our dignity intact or to straggle on the dance floor until last call is followed by a request by all involved to leave? Are these the types of questions Macbeth asked when he is forced awake by his “heat oppress’d brain”? I suppose these are the questions that “are now the two hours traffic of our stage.” Time will tell, and time is still on my side.

I might have a stiff drink, but that would only serve to set the motion into a lopsided free for all wherein my brain would frantically attempt to make ridiculous connections in a sloppy manner. Sobriety is the only way to drive, I am afraid. Anyway, the breeze is fine, the tunes are oldies but goodies, and time is on my side until the morning comes…and the morning always comes.